Wow, this is our second Friday together which means it’s the end of our Oakland portion of the Woodcock Honors Fellowship program. We leave for Dublin tomorrow evening which is extremely exciting since we are finally going off ‘to the world’.

This morning we presented our team pitch. I, along with Elgin, Mathew, and Ryan, pitched ‘ViewFinder’ which is a photography app that has many features such as photo sharing map, destination location, weather reports, and photo storing. I found the team pitch to be more comforting and it was easy for me to collaborate with my fellow teammates. I learned from my individual pitch that I needed to be fully prepared and know what I am trying to pitch. So, I spent time fully understanding what I was going to say in front of our ‘investors’ (judges) so that even if I forgot what I was going to say, I would be able to come up with another way to express what I wanted to say. Now that I’ve given two presentations, I feel that each time, I get calmer being in front of people. I’ve never presented something in front of judges before while I am more used to violin auditions in front of adjudicators. I felt that either way, I need to be overly prepared in order to succeed because at that moment, anything can happen.

After our presentations, we had our last guest lecturer of our Oakland portion of the program. We had the pleasure to talk and hear from Dr. Lada’s former co-worker from Berlin Packaging, Nancy. She was very thorough about supply chain and about process enhancement. She emphasized that everything is connected in someway that one action in the chain will affect what is downstream and upstream from it. She also stated that quality is not just the product itself but it is also the service that comes along with the selling of the product. This, I think, is crucial because in order to build loyalty and trust, the service like call centers, need to be efficient and genuine or the firm will lose customers especially if the call takers were rude and unhelpful. Another point I took away was that process enhancement comes with soft skills. Understanding that change takes persistence, comes from curiosity and self-assurance is crucial in order to enhance a system or chain of processing.

For me, I realized today that supply chain really is not my main focus or strength but it was very interesting to see the works of a person in that field. Today was a great day to wrap up our class, Management in Complex Environment, finish our presentations, and getting our last travel guidelines and tips from Brad. So, see you later Oakland, I’ll be back soon!